McCAFFERY: Local sports history shows 76ers' plan has no guarantee of success

Philadelphia 76ers' Thaddeus Young, left, Lorenzo Brown, middle, and Michael Carter-Williams watch from the bench during the second half of an NBA basketball game against the Cleveland Cavaliers, Tuesday, Feb. 18, 2014, in Philadelphia. The Cavaliers beat the 76ers 114-85. (AP Photo/Michael Perez)

PHILADELPHIA — The Sixers have a plan, an obvious one, brazen and cold.

The Sixers have a plan, and they are implementing it, one irresponsible short-term basketball move at a time.

The Sixers have a plan to rid themselves of players, of wins, of fans, of dignity.

The Sixers have a plan, they say, that will make them better later.

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The Sixers have a plan that might even make them so popular one day that their owner can demand a new arena, so his team won’t have to be the city’s only big-league tenant, and can be a landlord instead.

The plan might work. The fans, who have resisted booing even the most atrocious commitments of basketball, clearly are armed with patience. The NBA, and the way it has mangled its regulations for personnel finance, is a major reason why some franchises must crumble before they succeed.

The plan might work.

But it might not. Plans to build champions have failed before.

So, remember these :

• The Phillies had a plan, one celebrated and saluted, one splashed all over the front of baseball magazines.

The Phillies had a plan to collect not one, not two, not three but four recognized No. 1 major-league starting pitchers, believing that would enable them to suffocate opponents, denying them the pleasures of playing in tight Citizens Bank Park.

The plan was saluted as brilliant, as aggressive, as historic. Roy Halladay and Cliff Lee and Cole Hamels and Roy Oswalt — Joe Blanton, too — all in the same rotation? Order the world-championship caps, the kind with the dangling tags.

Turned out, there wasn’t a 20-game winner in the bunch, largely because 76 times — 76 of them — the Phillies scored three or fewer runs. They did win 102 regular-season games, but they went scoreless in the final eight innings of a 1-0 loss to the Cardinals in Game 5 of the first playoff round.

The Phillies had a plan.

The plan ultimately disappointed.

• The Eagles had a plan, or at least Andy Reid did — literally pounds of a plan, it was reported, a stack of papers and binders and books that he rammed before Jeffrey Lurie, who bought every one of Reid’s sales pitches, hiring him despite a shallow resume. Reid’s obsession with the long-snapper, legend says, is what made Lurie believe.

By then, Lurie was already deep into his own plan — a plan to make the Eagles look like the San Francisco 49ers when they were in a tidy NFL dynasty. It was built upon the innovative West Coast offense, first tried by Ray Rhodes, then embraced by Reid.

Thus, the equation: That irrepressible offense plus that dedication to detail must equal a championship. For that, Lurie gave Reid 14 years to try and never did win one Super Bowl.

The Eagles had a plan.

The plan ultimately disappointed.

• The Flyers had a plan. It involved doing anything to acquire the prospect believed to be the next NHL superstar. The plan would include spending money, moving players and, if necessary, getting the esquires involved.

Their plan was to hustle Eric Lindros into orange sweater No. 88, then clear space for more championship flags. It sounded good — good enough, even, to hurl Peter Forsberg into the mix to acquire Lindros’ rights from the Quebec Nordiques.

Lindros proved to be a fine player, the fulcrum on a line with John LeClair and Mikael Renberg, the famed “Legion of Doom.” But he was prone to injury and to postseason struggle.

The Flyers had a plan.

The plan ultimately disappointed.

Occasionally, plans work. Harold Katz had a plan to add Moses Malone to a front line that included Julius Erving and Bobby Jones, and the Sixers won a championship. The Flyers once had a plan to disturb all NHL peace by bullying their way to success, and they won two Stanley Cups. The Phillies were patient enough to not trade Ryan Howard, Jimmy Rollins, Hamels or Chase Utley for shorter-term championship chances, and they won the World Series in 2008.

But in sports, no plan guarantees a championship.

And that’s why it is less than amusing every time the Sixers use one to drape some truly horrid pro basketball.